Decoupling Growth From Headcount at a Fast Growing Carrier

Rudy Hervé, Chief Operating Officer of Palomar, explains what it takes to decouple growth from headcount at a two and a half billion dollar specialty carrier, and how a crop platform built in eighteen months by a team of ten to fifteen people changed the way Palomar approaches AI.

Raised in Amiens, two hours north of Paris in what he calls beer country, Rudy traces the path from a business school program that took him through Oxford, Madrid, and Paris, to equity research at Morgan Stanley during the dot com bubble, to Orange Ventures, where a portfolio company's founders and one of his own partners left to start Android, to an MBA at Wharton and three years at Bain, to a QBE trucking MGA that had written thirty million of a one hundred twenty million budget by June and was sold three years later, to SCOR and the headhunter call that moved his family to La Jolla.

Discover why the AI agents in Palomar's call center fell well short of their projected containment rates and how the team rebuilt the business case around earthquake surges and weekend coverage, why Palomar tracks every AI bet but says very little about them publicly, why giving up too early is a failure mode of its own when the models keep getting better, and what a senior partner meant when he told a worried junior analyst that in life you can only worry about what you can control.

In this episode:

1. 00:00Cold Open
2. 00:36Welcome and the engine room of Palomar
3. 03:01Growing up in Amiens, in beer country two hours north of Paris
4. 03:44Oxford, Madrid, Paris, and equity research at Morgan Stanley
5. 05:59Anything but insurance and the dot com deja vu
6. 08:01Why accounting was easier than marketing in a second language
7. 10:49Making the jump to the buy side at Orange Ventures
8. 14:44Finance can only take you so far
9. 17:29The 3G license bill that shut down the fund
10. 18:44The Sidekick team that went on to start Android
11. 20:10Following his future wife to the US for an MBA
12. 21:19Bain and every corner of financial services except insurance
13. 24:04Zero appreciation for the human side of implementation
14. 27:23Landing in insurance by total accident at QBE
15. 28:29A trucking MGA on fire and a sale three years later
16. 33:11Running technology without being an engineer
17. 35:04SCOR and the only company that would give him a P&L
18. 36:45Centralized in Paris and half the job is stakeholder management
19. 38:14What transformation means at a reinsurer
20. 40:47Never say no to a job you haven't been offered
21. 42:17The three coolest places in the US
22. 44:06Decoupling growth from headcount
23. 45:55When AI started coming up more than twice a month
24. 47:10Eighteen months and fifteen people versus four years and fifty
25. 50:05Tracking every AI bet and talking about very few
26. 51:13Lessons for carriers not seeing AI pay off
27. 52:27Good intentions and wrong assumptions on AI agents
28. 53:36An earthquake surge and a new business case
29. 55:10Giving up too early is its own failure mode
30. 57:07In life you can only worry about what you can control

Rudy Hervé has served as Chief Operating Officer of Palomar Specialty since June 2024. He most recently served as Global Head of P&C Operations for SCOR. Prior to SCOR, he held leadership roles at QBE North America and earlier gained professional experience at Bain & Company, Orange Ventures, and Morgan Stanley. He earned a Master's in Management from ESCP Europe and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

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